Mata Hari, byname of Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, née Zelle (born Aug. 7, 1876, Leeuwarden, Neth.—died Oct. 15, 1917, Vincennes, near Paris, France) dancer and courtesan whose name has become a synonym for the seductive female spy. She was shot by the French on charges of spying for Germany during World War I. The nature and extent of her espionage activities remain uncertain, and her guilt is widely contested.

Mata Hari.

Harlinque/H. Roger-Viollet

The daughter of a prosperous hatter, she attended a teachers’ college in Leiden. In 1895 she married an officer of Scottish origin, Capt. Rudolph MacLeod, in the Dutch colonial army, and from 1897 to 1902 they lived in Java and Sumatra. The couple returned to Europe but later separated, and she began to dance professionally in Paris in 1905 under the name of Lady MacLeod. She soon called herself Mata Hari, a Malay expression for the sun (literally, “eye of the day”). She and MacLeod divorced in 1906. Tall, extremely attractive, superficially acquainted with East Indian dances, and willing to appear virtually nude in public, Mata Hari was an instant success in Paris and other large cities. Throughout her life she had numerous lovers, many of them military officers.

Mata Hari wearing a Javanese-inspired costume.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The facts regarding her espionage activities remain obscure. According to one account, in the spring of 1916, while she was living in The Hague, a German consul is said to have offered to pay her for whatever information she could obtain on her next trip to France. After her arrest by the French, she acknowledged only that she had given some outdated information to a German intelligence officer.

According to statements that Mata Hari supposedly made, she had agreed to act as a French spy in German-occupied Belgium and did not bother to tell French intelligence of her prior arrangement with the Germans. She had intended to secure for the Allies the assistance of Ernest Augustus, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Germany and heir to the dukedom of Cumberland in the British peerage.

The French began to suspect her of duplicity, and on Feb. 13, 1917, she was arrested in Paris. She was imprisoned, tried by a military court on July 24–25, 1917, sentenced to death, and shot by a firing squad.

The German government publicly exculpated her in 1930, and the French dossier documenting her activities reportedly indicated her innocence. Viewed by only a few people, the dossier was scheduled for public release in 2017.

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(1876-1917). The name of the Dutch dancer and courtesan Mata Hari has become a synonym for the seductive female spy. The nature and extent of her espionage activities remain uncertain, however, and her guilt is widely contested.